Feelings
Between here and there . . .
(Conclusion)
By Emmanuelle
For a week, Manta would be a special guest of the city and of this man of influence. And Chuck would be one of the local celebrities invited to their late afternoon soirees and evening sorties.
Manta learns Chuck and his woman had split ways without even trekking to the altar. Chuck learns Manta is as elusively single as ever. Manta would proudly describe Chucks’ special influence over her as pinalaki niya ako. Likewise, Chuck would own-up fondly and yet wryly pinalaki ko siya. To the other guests, it would appear they were affirming a close acquaintance that had rooted from childhood.
They were fooling no one, themselves included.
They avoid probing deeper into the other’s eyes. So is touching hands. It singes them like burns from a fire. Kaya lang, they would gaze at each other’s retreating backs as lovingly and as longingly as if the years had been stripped of their passing. Then, bilis bawi ng tingin before being caught doing it.
Six years ago feels like just yesterday. How could a feeling so beautiful cut sharp like a knife?
Manta would flee from the scene of this sham as soon and as fast. Chuck would hunch back to his band. This time, it was a losing and a drowning of himself in his music, each performance turning frenzied to manic as dusk moves deeper into dark, and darkling cracks towards another dawning.
He was handling poorly his own particular hell on earth. Neither was it heaven for her. Yet very bravely and very alone, she was trying to make her mark in a bigger, a lot more cruel city.
What stops them from reaching out in love and absolution? Perhaps it is because when one is young, one feels the rest of tomorrow extends almost forever between here and there. One feels one has all the time to heal. One feels one has all the rest of what is left of time to forgive.
However, to one’s dismay, one can be so wrong on how one feels. So very, very wrong.
Before the year ends and long before Manta is expected back to the city, Chuck would drop by the house of the man of influence as had been his habit every time he misses Manta. He would look around and somehow lock on to something or someplace in the house to remind him of her. That would be his simpleng kaligayahan to last him for days, even weeks.
Chuck and his host would drink, and having drank, would proceed to be drunk as well.
Later, the host would claim he simply made a boast that, soon, Manta would be his wife. No one can testify to the truth of his story, but he further claims that after having spoken thus, Chuck would suddenly up and leave, plunk on his helmet and roar out of there on his big bike, all noise and all smoke.
From his host’s house at the outskirts of the city, Chuck would drive with crazed speed. He would zoom past other vehicles heedlessly. And he would beat all the stoplights within an inch of his life.
Except the last one. The one nearest his home where no woman waits.
This light changes to red. He brakes. He flies. His helmet was not thick enough to keep his skull in one piece. It could not even keep his brain from spewing out on the asphalt.
Manta returns to the city. The late afternoon soirees and evening sorties begin anew. She feels something was amiss though. She searches around, her eyes resting on no one. She seeks out her most familiar. She might not probe into his eyes, she might not touch his hand, but she gazes at his retreating back with love and longing. Seven years would be stripped of their passing.
It was with much prodding and pause that she was told of the end of Chuck’s flight.
She screams, but only in her mind and in her heart. Her light had switched shut. Her song had clicked off. A soundless wailing into an emptied space settles into a blanket of silence.
Manta’s story ends here, but not really. This writer sees Manta now and then. She teaches in a school for the specially disadvantaged. She also plays excellently and interchangeably any of the three or four instruments with one of the country’s most respected philharmonic orchestras.
And, yes, Kuya Gin, she is still young and as pretty as this writer described her in the first of these five series. And, no, she did not turn hopelessly desperada. Not all of those women who go through heaven and hell on earth become weak and wretched. Sometimes they do become strong, even stronger.
Manta has not visited his grave. There is no such a place, she gestures. She visits her high school though too often. She sits cross-legged on the ground under the shades of the acacia trees and gazes lovingly and longingly at a spot on the elevated stage at its opposite end. She brings out her flute and runs the scales.
Sounds exactly like a run though grass and sand and fine pebbles. Of leaps and soars across space and mirrors of water left by the rain. She leans back to play to the sky and to a face peeping from beyond.
Wait for me. Uhuh. I wait. Do not rush.
In case the writer didn’t put it clearly through, Manta is autistic, but one so specially gifted.
(Readers may reach columnist at jingmil@yahoo.com. For past columns, click http://sundaypunch.prepys.com/archives/category/opinion/feelings/
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